On Ep. 13 of Agentic Commerce, Simon Taylor, Founder @ Brainfood & Market Dev @ Tempo and Bam Azizi, CEO & Founder @ Mesh are joined by Pete Cooling, Founder & CEO @ Atum to discuss building Visa's stablecoin settlement infrastructure, founding Atum, how Atum connects fragmented payment apps, rails and currencies and more!
On Ep. 13 of Agentic Commerce, Simon Taylor, Founder @ Brainfood & Market Dev @ Tempo and Bam Azizi, CEO & Founder @ Mesh are joined by Pete Cooling, Founder & CEO @ Atum to discuss building Visa's stablecoin settlement infrastructure, founding Atum, how Atum connects fragmented payment apps, rails and currencies and more!
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Tokenized is sponsored by Visa
A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto.
Tokenized is also presented by Mesh
As the first global crypto payments network, Mesh makes it possible for anyone — or any agent — to pay or get paid instantly, from any wallet, on any chain, anywhere in the world. Learn more at meshpay.com
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We’d also like to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial, investment or legal advice, do your own research!
Music by Henry McLean
Pete Cooling 0:00
I have this thesis that payments are going to follow the same exact trend as high-frequency trading did. So when we had programmatic trading come, and now it just changed the world. You used to pay 20 bucks a trade, and you couldn't place a trade for a stock unless it was probably buying $2,000 worth of it to make it worth it for the fee. And now you see payment for order flow and free stock trading and people fractional shares and all of this. I think the same exact thing is coming for payments, and so we've built effectively high frequency trading for payments. So it's high frequency payments is the thesis, and that's what Atom facilitates. Now, if a human wants to click a button and send a transaction through Atom, great. If a non-agent-initiated payment wants to move through Atom, great. But the way the world is moving, we believe that this is going to be streamed payments at very high velocity, and the number of payments is going to accelerate meaningfully and really change the economics of the entire industry.
Sy Taylor 1:06
Welcome to Tokenized, the show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I'm author at Brainfood, head of Mark Dev and Tempo, and this, of course, is our agentic commerce series. So I'm joined by my agentic commerce co-host, the one and only Bam Azizi, CEO of Mesh. How are you doing, Bam? I'm
Bam Azizi 1:24
doing great. Excited for this session.
Sy Taylor 1:26
I'm excited for this session because joining us today is this fantastic Pete Cooling, who is the founder and CEO at Asim. How are you doing, Pete?
Pete Cooling 1:35
I'm doing fantastic. I'm probably the most excited for this session. Let's talk about it. Can't wait.
Sy Taylor 1:40
Let's get into all things agentic commerce just after our mind viewers and listeners that views and opinions of our contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. Please don't take anything we say as tax, legal, or financial advice. And a quick reminder that this podcast is made possible by Visa and our friends at Mesh. This episode is brought to you by Mesh, the global crypto payments network. Mesh makes it possible for anyone or any agent to get paid or pay instantly from any wallet on any chain anywhere in the world. You can learn more at meshpay.com. Hi Pete, you had a very, very on-topic journey to agentic commerce for this particular show because you ran the crypto product team at Visa, then represented them on the Open Wallet Foundation. So, what made you leave to go build Atom?
Pete Cooling 2:39
As you mentioned, I've been working on payment systems for a number of years. By the time I got to Visa Crypto, it was surprisingly that stablecoins. So I got introduced first. Let me let me back up and say introduced to crypto and blockchains and Bitcoin in 2016. Let's say since then recognized the blockchain as a distributed system that was purpose built from the ground up for payments, so it's a payments network with a global currency running over the top. That was self-evident from me for the very first time, all the way up through when I joined Visa, and I was shocked, honestly, at how much of the market was building towards trading and speculation. So everything, 99.99% of the whole market and ecosystem to that point had been built for trading, so you join Visa. You're going to get all of this payments volume on chain for Visa. It's going to be wonderful, and you get in there and you realize actually even Visa itself doesn't realize the power of stablecoins as a medium of exchange and a payment tokenized currency. So I know Bam, you and I probably interacted at the time, you're probably very aware of this as well. So it was a little bit shocking, but the team was fantastic. Like the Visa Crypto team is a special, special team today and and back then, and from inception. So we did a lot of cool things, had a lot of fun. It was a little bit like Sisyphus rolling that rock up the mountain, just constantly falling back down on us. And now today you see it's it's crossed the precipice, and everyone's surfing down on top, and and the ride's much more enjoyable. But a lot of the things we built back then were very difficult. We built stablecoin settlement as an example. In I think it was 2021 we first built it. Visa crypto treasury didn't exist. Visa treasury had never moved a tokenized currency or a tokenized dollar ever since inception, and so we built that from the ground up. Really got Visa crypto treasury running. We had Visa stablecoin settlement moving money, but it was millions, right? Millions of dollars. 2021, 2022, and you fast forward now, 20 billion annualized run rate. So I knew, and the whole team collectively knew that the future was much bigger and faster and more enormous and exciting. And so we did our best to pull that future forward. But I always, in the back of my mind, you know, watching stablecoin settlement try to onboard issuers in fintechs in other countries and say use USDC on Ethereum, and then nine. Months later, we were evaluating blockchains and currencies like they were software vendors. So we added Solana after a nine-month evaluation, and I just thought that this can't be the way. It's got to be faster. It's got to be bigger. And so I started Atom, and I think we've proven that to be true. I think our goal is really to pull the whole ecosystem forward and realize that future faster and pull companies like Visa and other enterprises and fintechs and developers along because we know it's coming. It's accelerating. It's really difficult to do at a very large incumbent.
Sy Taylor 5:32
So tell me the next bit of the story. You know, you came out of stealth on the 22nd of September, which is as we record this less than a month ago, just a few weeks ago, with 13 and a half million led by Varian, PayPal Ventures in there. What is this thing you describe as an open payments network? And don't we have blockchains already? Like, what's the payments network bit of it?
Pete Cooling 5:53
Yeah, great question. Love talking about this. So I don't think there's been an open payments network in the past. I think this is what I would consider the first open payments network, which is Atom, and so I'll break it down in plain English. So open, meaning there's a bunch of siloed ecosystems today in payments. Bam, you know this very well. I think you've mentioned this a million times. Everyone knows about the fragmentation problem, but think about just the siloed apps. How Venmo can't send to Cash App, and Zelle can't send internationally. So you have all of these siloed apps, you have all of these siloed rails, siloed currencies, siloed geographies. So open meaning that Atom connects all of these endpoints together in an open way to coordinate across them. And then when we say payments, it means that we've built from day zero, from the ground up for payments. Now, going back to what I said previously, the entire ecosystem and space has been dedicated. All the money that's been invested, all the builders, the talented, brilliant, prolific developers have been building for the past 10 plus years for trading and speculative use cases, and we really haven't seen anybody until recently. Some pivots, some net new, starting from the ground up, building for payments by payments experts for payments companies. So payments really means that we have all of the payments features and functionalities that payments companies and developers expect from traditional payments. And so we could talk more about what that means. But that's the payments part about this. We don't deal with meme coins and volatile assets and trading use cases. We have no intention to ever do that. And then network. When we say network, so an open payments network, Atom is this because developers will build on Atom. So the next generation of fintech will be built on Atom, and I use the analogy of how Stripe, way back when, was built on the card networks, and then Shopify came around and built on top of Stripe rather than building the entire payment stack from scratch. And what that did was then millions of merchants were able to build on Shopify. So a network has these emergent properties where developers and businesses can build on top, and then new business models can emerge. And so we partner across the entire ecosystem. We want we're not going to build everything ourselves. We want to partner with companies like Mesh, and companies like Visa and Mastercard and Stripe, and watch the world build the next generation of fintech on top of Atom. So it's a network. So that's how I describe an open payments network.
Bam Azizi 8:24
Does that mean that you only accept stablecoin, or you still accept people paying with all sort of assets? And I have a follow up question on that. Like, do you allow people? Like, is there anything about lending that you guys are doing? Like, can I borrow against my Bitcoin and pay with a stablecoin.
Pete Cooling 8:43
Great question. So the first one, we don't. Adam doesn't accept anything, right? This is by virtue of the design of the business model. We don't really care or pick and choose what you accept. I will say that they're medium of exchanges. The currencies are medium of exchanges. Now we don't support fiat today; it's all stablecoin. But what we are looking for is endpoints and settler operators who will also be fiat operators who can settle the fiat leg of a transaction. So if you think of a payment request coming through the network on Atom, anyone can bid on the on-ramp leg, the stablecoin leg, the off-ramp leg, and so we'll have fiat, we'll have stablecoin settlement operators that can fulfill each of those or the entire payment lifecycle and journey. And we're just providing the infrastructure and tooling for that journey. When it comes to lending, I will say I think this is very interesting. I'm not ready to really discuss this too much, but I think lending becomes extremely exciting when you think about just-in-time funding for payments, and when you think about liquidity provisioning for payments and FX. And so, again, what I will say here is that Adam is building the infrastructure and tools to provide any company to come build, you know, lending, active lending. Massive lending to settlement operators and much more, which we'll get into, I think, in the future. We're not quite there yet, but we have a lot of cool ideas that we can discuss soon.
Sy Taylor 10:09
You have some pretty interesting primitives already, though: authorization, reversible payments, identity. This is obviously the bit that makes it a network that sits above any individual chain. You are trying to have these network features. How do you do that and be open? Because like Visa has scheme rules, it has incentive mechanisms baked in. So how are you thinking about that trust side of an open network?
Pete Cooling 10:34
It's a good question, but if you think about stablecoins, really none of this is built out. Really, you don't have such a thing as an authorization? I mean, you could say that there's an authorization that happens. I push stablecoins to BAM, and he receives them whether he wants them or not. You could call that an authorization. But when we talk about payments, there's really no authorization flows, authorization mechanisms, fraud prevention tooling, risk scoring,
Bam Azizi 10:59
no chargeback, right?
Pete Cooling 11:00
Exactly. None of this. So there's a lot of work to do.
Sy Taylor 11:04
I imagine it's fun for an ex Visa guy to try and redesign the ISO 8583 and look at those payments messages and just go, what the heck? And also to try and deal with the fact that issuers are from Venus and merchants are from Mars and like all of the idiosyncratic things that exist in that universe,
Pete Cooling 11:21
you know what's even more fun, Simon, is not having to do that, having to start over with this new paradigm of technology and tools and infrastructure. The paradigm's really shifted, so we don't have to worry about that. What we can do is connect back into it, right? We're not trying to build something that isolates another payment rail or a a type of identity layered.
Sy Taylor 11:43
You're just looking for the abstractions, right? Like, yeah, rather than doing everything in a flat file, and everybody has a different opinion about what this inside of a flat file means.
Pete Cooling 11:51
We are completely agnostic. Abstraction is the perfect word, and I think that's what the entire ecosystem has needed for many, many years: is an abstraction layer over the top of all this complexity,
Sy Taylor 12:02
and so what does that look like? Pete's going to pay BAM, but BAM is a merchant. BAM is concerned about you know this could be fraud. We don't really think it's Pete's wallet, whatever. How does the merchant know that? Like, what does that look like inside of a transaction flow? The
Pete Cooling 12:18
big thing here is when you talk about counterparties, and you talk about you know crypto the way it used to be. You knew nothing about your counterparty except their wallet address, and they might have sent you an email or a text, something on Telegram said, "This is me, and here's my wallet address." So it really comes down to to answer your question, identity. And so this goes back to my experience with digital identity. I actually have a passion for digital identity, building identity products, but I always found you can't really sell identity for identity's sake. No one wants to pay for identity. It's a cost center. It's not fun. It's not sexy. So when I was the representative for Visa on the Open Wallet Foundation, with Google and Microsoft and central banks and governments all rallying to build an open-source digital wallet spec or reference implementation that can hold your payment card credentials and account credentials and stablecoins and identity credentials. I realized very quickly this is the future: digital wallets as the interface. All of these credentials. So when we talk about crypto at Atom, a funny thing happens. We're not talking about crypto as most people say crypto within Atom. We're building so much identity technology. We're talking about crypto, cryptography, and that's what we generally speak of within Atom. So there's so much crypto within that open wallet interface, this reference implementation, and it gets into the whole idea of tokenization. What is tokenization? When we say real-world assets and tokenized stocks, well, tokenization happened with Visa starting out with tokenizing cards, and so we're tokenizing everything. So it's cryptography, tokenization, signatures, all packed into one. And so I think that's that's really the future is identity powering the facilitation of fraud prevention, risk scoring, chargebacks, things like this in the future.
Sy Taylor 14:07
Tokenizing identity is that verifiable credentials, IAL two sort of style, all of that good stuff.
Pete Cooling 14:16
Decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, absolutely.
Sy Taylor 14:19
Yeah. Okay. Sorry for nerding out a little bit there on the on the detail, but that stuff's been around for a while. But it's interesting that the the time has now come to potentially use them and inside of a wallet. And with the Open Wallet Foundation background, you're now looking at a network and going, how do I how do I make sure that identity can work with this network with privacy and DIDs and verifiable credentials are kind of perfect for that. So it's interesting timing.
Pete Cooling 14:46
I think you see the whole industry coalescing around this. You're seeing regulators start talking about KYC and reusable KYC for the first time, which the whole industry and identity has been pushing and building this technology to support. So it's really about. Consortiums and how to bring everybody together, and turns out we don't need a consortium. We've got the tech, and now we've got the reason to use the tech as everything's getting tokenized. And so I think it's it's time for identity to come play a major role.
Sy Taylor 15:14
You don't need a consortium. How do you get distribution?
Pete Cooling 15:17
I think the digital wallets are really the Trojan horse, and no one talks about it. But when you had Alipay and WeChat and so much adoption in emerging markets of digital wallets, and what that did is abstract, let's say, a card credential behind the wallet. So Apple Pay comes in, and everyone thinks they're using an Apple payment product, which they are, but it's running through the card rails. It's just the card has been tokenized. So these things start to become invisible, and anyone not pushing for this future of tokenized identity is kind of left at a crossroads. We either push against this, or we actually go facilitate this to make it easier to onboard to different apps to sell new services. And I think regulators are actually onto it as well, and getting very smart and sophisticated about understanding how much data leakage there is if we don't tokenize identity credentials.
Sy Taylor 16:07
So really, should I think about it as a wallet identity network that enables payments because it's it's kind of a it's so wallet centric around what you're building.
Pete Cooling 16:18
It's a nice insight. I will admit that I do say that a payment network is actually an identity network disguised as a payment network, and so I will lean into that and say yes. But no, I wouldn't go with your initial characterization. We'll stick with Adam, the Open Payments Network.
Sy Taylor 16:35
Okay. Yeah. Well, I guess it's one of those that scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox is playing the guitar, and then he loses it on the '80s ripping solo, and then ah, you kids aren't ready for that, but your kids are gonna love it. It's like, is the person ready to understand that? How how deep down the rabbit hole have you gone? But Bam, I'm so interested in your thoughts on this. You've been spending forever trying to connect all of this stuff and and help people abstract it. What what do you think of the role of identity in all this?
Bam Azizi 17:00
Yeah, I can nerd out about identity all day long because my my previous company was in identity space called No Password, and like identity in last like 20 years is kind of the graveyard of a lot of great companies. So if you don't get it right, you will die. So it's a dangerous game that you should not play at home. I think if someone can do that, it's Pete and his team, because of his experience at Open Wallet and what he has done there, and then now he's bringing that experience. But Pete, I want to play back what I've heard from you. So basically, you're using cryptography, you're abstracting all the complexity of blockchain, but you you're giving all the upside of it to your customers or businesses, so they can use money or asset in a tokenized format at rest, which is your wallet, in transit, which is the payment, right? So either you interact outside of the wallet or you're restoring the value. So you will have all the tools to be able to move money or hold money. Is that correct?
Pete Cooling 18:00
I'd rephrase it. So we Adam doesn't offer a wallet at all. Like again, we're agnostic about wallet providers. So bring your own wallet, bring your own setup. What we're doing is enabling you. Once you have some type of currency, tokenized currency in a wallet, you initiate a payment request, and then it goes through the fundamental mechanism of the protocol to move through what is essentially a marketplace of settlement operators who bid. We have an auction. Essentially, the price gets driven down to the lowest price as an open free market and economic open free market, and then it gets delivered to the recipient. Now, underlying that is all of this tooling, all of the identity credentials that can pass through the payment lifecycle, all of the authorizations that can be done, but built with the wallet holders.
Bam Azizi 18:48
So wallet can interact with this open payment network.
Pete Cooling 18:52
Absolutely, 100%
Bam Azizi 18:54
makes sense. And the identity piece is we have like the three play, right? The authentication, the authorization, the accounting. So, are you doing all three, or you're just at the authentication? Yeah, just verify who I am. Do you do anything on the authorization piece as well? Like what level of authorization I have? Like, do you manage that as well at Atom?
Pete Cooling 19:16
We have authentication. So for the developer platform, people can be authenticated into the platform. We have an authorization system, you could say, doing checks across all the counterparties, and then we have the settlement. So the actual payment settlement, the life cycle. Now we're not settling the payment, but the infrastructure, the protocol, if you will, underlying it is facilitating the settlement of the payment.
Bam Azizi 19:39
That could be count As accounting,
Pete Cooling 19:41
correct reconciliation, all of that, dispute resolution, all of that could go. We would provide the tools once again for any business to do that on top.
Sy Taylor 19:49
I am going to take a quick pause here, Pete, while we hear from our sponsors, because I want to come back and talk a little bit about the whole agentic side, which is the purpose of this show. Stablecoin operations usually mean a wallet from one vendor and on-ramp from another, and then controls stitched together across all of them. Visa's stablecoin platform fixes this fundamentally. You can mint, move, and manage stablecoins across OpenUSD, and you remain your own custodian, all in one single environment. Then, stablecoin-linked cards let you spend balances anywhere Visa is accepted. That's Visa, the global leader in payments, and of course, sponsor of this show. You can find out more at visa.com/crypto. Hi, Pete. Talk to me about agents on the network. I know you support x4 102 and the Machine Payments Protocol. Are agents competing a lot of transactions on your network today? What are they paying for, and what's your role in dealing with agents?
Pete Cooling 20:58
So I'll be the first to admit and be completely honest that there is not much agentic payment volume. Period.
Bam Azizi 21:06
You're not the first one admitting this.
Pete Cooling 21:09
And the other thing I'd say is the merchants accepting the merchant endpoints. So we accept or facilitate X402 and MPP payments through Atom. The merchant endpoints are not names that I can recall or that you might have heard of, and so. But I think what's extremely interesting is who's sending the payments on the other side. The enterprises that are getting ready for real merchants to come integrate to accept agent-based payments on Atom. So we're what we're seeing is extremely promising. The MPP X402 facilitation is just a huge shout out to the Atom engineering team, which I will say is the entire Atom team. I don't know if they include me in that, but it's me and a bunch of engineers. So they've built some very creative solutions. Some have innovated heavily in the space and are now working with enterprises to build what will become something that I think is going to accelerate adoption of X402 MPP, but again, we're agnostic of which of these protocols wins. Just agentic payments in general. I think now what we're seeing with Muse and Instinct, et cetera, the consumer side is is getting ready. They're getting primed, and I think the merchant side now has the incentive, or soon will have the incentive to step up, and what Adam can do is help them integrate to accept stablecoin-based agentic payments and more in the future. But right now, we're focusing on stablecoin payment acceptance.
Sy Taylor 22:32
Do you think then that the consumer agent will be sort of the the consumer side wallet and the checkout of tomorrow could equally be MPPX 402 on stablecoins, and is there some driver to go away from the card networks towards a stablecoin-based payment network that's beneficial to the merchant?
Pete Cooling 22:56
So again, like we're agnostic, and I think we can tie all of this stuff together. There's no reason why you can't start with a wallet. And let's say you move through some CLI tool, and your wallet has a card. Again, we go back to the Open Wallet Foundation: digital wallets, identity credentials, card credentials, account credentials, stable coins, and so you have all of this, and you initiate a payment request. Now, today, if it's a $3,000 TV, you might use a card. You might want the cash back and the points. If it's a 30 cent payment for something else, compute, inference, gaming, a microtransaction, you would definitely not use a card, or the agent would not prefer to use a card. And then from there, I think it takes off into a whole game theoretical conversation about incentives and drivers. And I would love to have that on a separate call. I think it's fascinating, and I think we'll see that play out
Bam Azizi 23:46
soon.
Sy Taylor 23:47
Can you go deeper into that? Because I think that's the thing that everybody's missing in this conversation is like, what are the reasons agentic commerce would take off and actually use stablecoins? Because you can sort of quite plainly look at this and go: the card networks are sticky. You could give a card to an agent, and you can even do things like sessions where you open an auth and you don't capture and close it until you know after a bunch of micro payments have happened. So, you can even facilitate micro payments inside of the cards. So, I try and be as intellectually honest as I can here, and say I can see a bunch of reasons where machine to machine that gets a little bit interesting when you need that extreme speed, or maybe you need to actually get cash sooner because you need to collapse the settlement with the authorization. Because like I sell some widget online as an agent, and I have to go buy inference. I've run out of inference, so I need to get the sale now so I can go buy some more inference. I think those that streaming of money that Kai talks about is really an interesting use case for stablecoins collapsing the auth and the settlement. But but what are you seeing as that incentive story? Would you unpack that?
Pete Cooling 25:01
Yeah, let me comment just because it's so fascinating. I'd love if Kai were here. This would be a fun one. We've probably talked about this in the past, but an open streaming session with a card that I would love to see that. Right, because what's missing there is likely price discovery and efficiency and optimization and the ability to paying fractions of a cent transactions in real time across multiple markets, multiple payment rails, 24/7, 365, and actually move the money. So, I'm not going to say I'm skeptical. I would love to see that. So you can do it with MPP sessions today. It's a little hacky, but just the way you walk into a gas station and you unhook, you know, you swipe your card, you unhook it, and you stick it in the car, and the meter's running. The authors has been started, but the capture doesn't happen until you place it back on the hook at the end. You can do that. Are you getting the price discovery between the card network itself and other networks? No, but then how efficient do you need to be,
Sy Taylor 26:00
you know, basis points wise for that individual transaction, to where actually having acceptance is more of a feature than the price. Because if something's got more acceptance and it's a fraction hair's width more expensive versus something that's a little less expensive but has no acceptance, then even that would be necessarily preferable. Surely,
Pete Cooling 26:24
I'm very much a both and type of guy rather than an either or guy. So I think all of this is great. It's like cash today. It's great that we have cash. You don't use it for everything, but you can have cash and right. So this is fine, and I think this will continue. The question I'd have back though is: You open this session. How long do you keep the session open for? And during that time, are you comparing prices across other venues? So if you can compare across throughout the session, then you don't have to predetermine how long that session should be open and get kind of. It's almost vendor lock-in on a micro transaction, a micro scale. And when we think about the future, everything is going to be happening in nanoseconds, and I don't think we're ready for it. Interesting. Bam. Any thoughts on this?
Bam Azizi 27:09
Do you guys do also streaming of the money? Do you support that type of like payments that the money keep coming?
Pete Cooling 27:16
100%. Yeah. So every payment on that. It's when I was back at Visa, and I was I love the Visa Treasury team like 100. This is one of the most brilliant teams and a historic team for what they've accomplished. But watching people manually click buttons to move money at Visa or a company like it is really difficult for me to stomach. It's almost painful. And so when we built Atom, the whole idea is that payments should be automated. Payments should be moving. I mean, I'll take a step back and I'll say that I have this thesis that payments are going to follow the same exact trend as high-frequency trading did. So when we had programmatic trading come, and now it just changed the world. You used to pay 20 bucks a trade, and you couldn't place a trade for a stock unless it was probably buying $2,000 worth of it to make it worth it for the fee. And now you see payment for order flow and free stock trading and people fractional shares and all of this. I think the same exact thing is coming for payments. And so we've built effectively high frequency trading for payments. So it's high frequency payments is the thesis, and that's what Atom facilitates. Now, if a human wants to click a button and send a transaction through Atom, great. If a non-agent initiated payment wants to move through Atom, great. But the way the world is moving, we believe that this is going to be streamed payments at very high velocity, and the number of payments is going to accelerate meaningfully and really change the economics of the entire industry.
Sy Taylor 28:44
So tell me what drives that. What drives that velocity? Where does it start?
Pete Cooling 28:50
I think agents and AI and everything that we're seeing today is what drives that. There's we're clicking so many buttons, and we're going to delegate those tasks to our agents, and when the agents can pull, just like they can pull from your email and go check a review or get a refund, they're going to be able to move your money efficiently across all of these different systems, across all different endpoints. So the way I see this is a network of endpoints, which are digital wallets and agents that can facilitate through automation based on parameters that users set across all of these different endpoints, and you'll see basically a neural network of activity, which is the future payments network. So,
Sy Taylor 29:30
if the thesis is that companies historically monetized inertia, you don't change your direct deposit, you don't go apply for the refund, you don't cancel the subscription. The first use case of agents is they deal with that inertia. They'll wait on hold for two hours. They'll cancel the subscription. They'll get you the refund. There's also another form of inertia, which is vendor lock-in through convenience. It's hard to change vendor. There might be something that performs better at every single. Task, but you're not choosing that vendor if it's giving you a slightly better price or better performance or better outcome because of that lock-in effect. Agents don't have to worry about that; they're not locked in. They can deal with onboarding something new, and if they can identify themselves and authenticate themselves with a payments credential, they can buy that thing that's better performance, better priced from anywhere in a marketplace. I actually compare this more like ad tech than high frequency trading, but it's a similar idea. It's this marketplace where there's buyers and sellers, and there's this matching algorithm missing above it, which is agents kind of competing for you know this negotiation layer of like, how do these two things get netted out? I think who's building Hyperliquid for agents to find the best price and best route?
Pete Cooling 30:49
I would call this Adam today. So Simon, we could go deep down a rabbit hole, and I'd love for you to talk to my teams, especially Gene, who architected the entire system, about my fascination with programmatic advertising and the digital advertising space, probably for another call. But I'd say that this is exactly where we're going, right? And when you think about streaming payments, imagine a lot of contractors around the world get paid out in stablecoins today. Imagine the agent can just negotiate a different price, a different deal if they can stream the payment to that contractor constantly, right? Maybe the company is paying less because the contractor elects to receive less in total in aggregate at a higher frequency. So I think this is where the game theory and the incentives come into play. Is this hyper negotiation across all types of goods and services being transacted in real time with all of the calculations that the agents can do, without us having to pull up spreadsheets and worry about making mistakes and negotiating this through bespoke bilateral agreements with everybody,
Sy Taylor 31:51
hyper negotiation is the new hyper liquid. I think that's
Bam Azizi 31:57
fascinating.
Sy Taylor 31:58
It's a tagline for you. So what I do, Bam? Have you looked into that like negotiation and efficiency space at all?
Bam Azizi 32:05
Yeah, I didn't. So from my perspective, that's kind of where the economy is going. So if everything is tokenized and everything is settled on blockchain, and agents are communicating with each other, like as I mentioned before, like we have 5 billion people connected to internet. We will have hundreds of billions of agents connected to internet. Humans they do two transactions per day in average. They cannot comprehend beyond that in average. So agents do 1000s of micro transactions per second. So just imagine the world that you have to use traditional financial rails for moving money, moving value around. So that's the direction we're heading. So negotiation could be like hyper negotiation could be a small piece of that future economy, but definitely something that the higher frequency, the lower denomination is needed for this new economy to flourish. I think that's the trend that we're going, and I think Atom is in the core and center of it to enable those type of payments.
Sy Taylor 33:05
I'm interested then in Atom. Like, what was your journey like? Is the product live? Can I use it? Who's the first best customer? What's all that looking like?
Pete Cooling 33:15
It's live. So we were in stealth for about 14 months, which had its pros and cons. It was very fun to build silently with this team. We had a great time, just heads down building. So really, we came out of stealth and showed the world what we'd already built. But we were already live with customers prior to that. So the whole end-to-end platform network is live. You can go use it today. You can go to Adam.xyz, check it out, see our docs, build something on it. If you want to be a participate as a settlement operator, reach out, talk to us. We could discuss onboarding you. So there's many ways to participate, and we think devs, and we're already seeing actually devs doing some really interesting things. So we're very excited. But Simon, go try it, please.
Sy Taylor 33:56
Heck yeah, I will. Well, look, I got to get prepped for yet another podcast with your friend of mine, Kai Sheffield. So that's about all the time we have for this week. But I'm so excited to give that an exact try. And Bam, if people want to get hold of you and Mesh, where do they go to do that?
Bam Azizi 34:10
Bam is easy Mesh and check MeshPay.com. Happy to talk and answer any questions you have.
Sy Taylor 34:17
You'll find me at SY Taylor on all of the socials at BrainFood.xyz, and of course Tempo.xyz, where we are making stablecoins move a little bit faster than everywhere else, with a little bit more privacy every single day. And if you haven't already, you need to subscribe to the show because that's how you'll find more conversations like this where we let operators just go. And so that was a really fun conversation, Pete. I hope people will check out everything you do, and thank you very much. We'll catch you next time.